


Love And Other Languages

by anythingbutplatonic



Series: Olicity Hiatus Road Trip Collection [1]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, Hopeless romantic Oliver Queen, Summer of Olicity, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, olicity - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-10 00:13:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4369754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutplatonic/pseuds/anythingbutplatonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>loveheartlover prompted: "things you said when you thought i was asleep"</p><p>My first attempt at writing an Olicity fic because I have recently become Olicity trash and I've been itching to try out writing for new fandoms now that Glee is sadly over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love And Other Languages

Oliver was talking in his sleep again.

No, not talking. Whispering. And the words - she wasn’t even sure if they were words - were a low murmur, vowels and consonants and syllables strung together in a way that sounded like the buzz of bees in summer.

Ugh,  _bees_. Why did she have to think about bees? She hated bees. They looked all cute and round and fluffy with their buzzing and flitting around, but getting stung by one when she was six years old had not been fun, and then there was that whole incident with Brie Larvan and her army of psychotic killer bee robots -

 _Focus, Felicity_ , she told herself firmly. She shifted position, stretching out so that she was pressed against as much of Oliver’s body as her own height would allow, her toes coming to rest someplace mid-calf. They probably looked ridiculous, her being pitifully short compared to his own well-defined brawn - not that she was complaining about that, absolutely not - but she was long past caring. Oliver was warm and solid and - well,  _everything_. Everything she had never allowed herself to have and everything she couldn’t believe was really hers now that she did have it.

Sometimes she had to pinch herself all over again, to make sure that this was real, that it wasn’t some elaborate dream she was having and she’d wake up in her woefully empty single bed back in her apartment in Starling City,  _alone_ , where the only intimacy she had was with her coffee maker.

But it  _was_  real. She wasn’t in Starling City any more; neither of them were. And it was pretty damn fantastic.

Which brought her back to the issue of Oliver’s sleep-talking.

Felicity knew that Oliver and sleep did not get on well. She knew he had nightmares, recurring ones; ones about things that had already happened, ones about things that had happened but with the events distorted and twisted, the people in the dreams replaced with others and what started out as good events ending in tragedy, and ones about what  _might_  happen in the future. They all ended with him gasping awake next to her, staring blindly around the room until his gaze came back into focus and wherever it was he had “been” - Lian Yu, Hong Kong, a cell in the Russian gulag, the fortress at Nanda Parbat - falling away as reality came back in. 

She also knew that, aside from the nightmares, he slept fairly uneventfully, lying flat on his back (and almost never in any other position unless they had fallen asleep while cuddling and were wrapped around each other like vines with little hope of extracting themselves until the morning) until he woke up. 

Point? The sleep-talking was new. He’d never done it before, at least, not to her knowledge. And she’d gotten to know him pretty intimately over the last couple of months, so if this  _was_  a thing that he tended to do, talk in his sleep, she’d probably already know about it. Which, clearly, she didn’t. 

Her shifted position gave her a better vantage point from which to listen to his sleep-induced vocalizations, and hopefully figure out what the hell it was he was saying. And as she listened, careful not to do anything that might give her away and wake him, the words started to make sense.

Well, almost.

_“…Ya vas lyubil tak iskrenno, tak nezhno, tak kak day vam bog mozhet byt’ lyubimym drugim chelovekom.”_

Because apparently he was speaking Russian. In his  _sleep_. 

Felicity had never heard of anyone who spoke another  _language_  while they slept. 

This was definitely a “first” that she had not thought of when mentally compiling the list of relationship-related “firsts” that she and Oliver would be doing on their trip.  _First time your boyfriend sleep-talks in another language and you have absolutely zero idea what he’s saying_. 

And then he said her name. Granted, it was followed by a jumble of consonants and vowels that made no sense to her because,  _hello_ , the only Russian word she knew was “vodka”, but it was definitely her name. 

 _“Ya tebya lyublyu,_ Felicity.”

This was followed by the slight creaking and dipping of the mattress as he, still sound asleep, reached over to brush back a lock of her hair over her shoulder. 

The touch of his fingers against her bare skin made her flinch instinctively, and the suddenness of her movement startled him into repeating her name like a question, no longer muffled with sleep but fully-conscious.

“Felicity?”

She froze, hoping he might have simply taken her flinching as evidence of a dream of some sort that she was having, but the part of her brain that knew Oliver so well realized that he would never buy that sort of excuse. 

She rolled over to face him, feigning ignorance. “Hmm?” 

“You’re awake.” 

“….yes, I am?” She squinted in the dimness of the room, the proximity to him and the absence of her glasses making it hard to read his face. 

“How long have you been awake?”

“Um….” Felicity racked her brains, trying to figure out when it was she had woken up and heard him. “Five minutes? Why, what time is it?”

He ignored her question, instead choosing to ask another one of his own. “And did you - did you hear everything that I said?” There was a nervousness, a tentativeness, in his voice that she rarely heard. She had only heard it one other time, in fact, when he had asked her out on their very first (and only) real date. 

“Why? What it something bad?” 

“No.” He shook his head, and then became suddenly shy, not wanting to meet her eye despite the small smile spreading across his face. His teeth were very white in the dark room, and she swore that if she looked hard enough, she could see a blush on his cheeks.

At that, she had an idea of her own. “Oliver Queen, were you talking  _dirty_  to me in another language while you thought I was asleep?”

“No!” He was laughing, now, that full-bodied laugh of his that she rarely heard, his smile impossibly wide. “No, I wasn’t doing that. Actually, I - you’re going to think it’s embarrassing, maybe I shouldn’t - I thought you were asleep, Felicity, otherwise I would have-”

She shimmied up next to him, close enough for her to lay her hand on his chest, the top of her head just reaching his chin. “Oliver, you need to use your words or I can’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

“It’s Pushkin.”

“Excuse me?”

“Pushkin. The poet. He’s a famous Russian writer, and he wrote this poem around 1830, and it’s about love. And I was - reciting it to you. In Russian. Because I thought you were asleep.”

Felicity was, for several moments, struck dumb; her mouth even gaped open slightly in surprise (something she would later regret as being totally unattractive, gaping at Oliver like a goldfish) while a warm, fuzzy feeling was spreading through her chest, down to her stomach and fingers and toes.

“I said it was embarrassing.”

“Oh, Oliver, it’s not embarrassing. It’s really, really  _romantic_. And I love romance. Even the cheesy kind. Though I’m never watching  _The Notebook_  again because once was enough, I cried for three hours after watching that movie and it made me terrified of getting old.”

When he looked confused, she explained, “Because the elderly couple whose story the movie tells, well, it doesn’t end well. Because the woman in the story, Allie, she has dementia and doesn’t remember Noah at all, even though they’re in the retirement home together, and then she dies. It’s really sad. You wouldn’t like it.”

“I like the idea of growing old with you,” he said, simply. And,  _oh_ , there was that warm, fuzzy feeling again, getting stronger and stronger, making her whole body tingle. “ _Pomni, ya vsеgda ryadom.”_

“Was that more Pushkin?”

“No. It means,  _Remember, I’m always next to you.”_

Felicity smiled against the warm skin of his throat, feeling and hearing his heart beating through the thin material of his shirt.  _“_ I had no idea you were such a hopeless romantic. And all this time I was harbouring the notion of you being the kind of guy who refuses to go into a florist to buy flowers for Valentine’s Day because it’s  _tacky_.”

“I’ve just never met the right woman until now,” he replied, his gaze intense, the words heavy with meaning. 

“Well, I’m a very lucky girl, then.”

_“Ty ne prav. Ya schastlivchik.”_

_You’re wrong. I’m the lucky one_.

But Felicity was already asleep, and she did not hear him. 

**Author's Note:**

> The Pushkin poem that Oliver (partially) recites to Felicity is "I Loved You" (1830). I used Google Translate for the Russian so if I’ve bastardized this fine eastern European language, I apologize. It’s Google’s fault.
> 
> Like I said, this is my very first attempt at writing Olicity so please - any feedback would be greatly appreciated and is very much encouraged.


End file.
